German Citizenship Research Articles

Mobilisation of polish into german army from occupies polish territory in Second world war

At the outbreak of the Second World War, some of the local population of the territory annexed to the German Reich were granted partial or full German citizenship by Heinrich Himmler’s decree on the Deutsche Volksliste (German People’s List). At the same time, men of draft age, like other Reich citizens, became subject to military service. However, the first mass conscriptions to the German army in the annexed territory took place even earlier, in the spring of 1940. At the time, a rather strange term Deutsch-Polen (German Pole) was used in German internal correspondence to describe conscripts from the annexed part of Poland

Playing dirty: the shady governance and reproduction of migrant illegality

ABSTRACT State authorities in Europe invest immense resources in what the EU insists on calling the ‘fight against illegal migration’. Based on ethnographic research in two German cities, this paper shows that a tough approach towards illegalised migration can only be implemented through state practices that operate at the margins of, or even cross, the boundaries of what is legally permissible. This argument is developed through an analysis of informal practices that frontline staff in registry offices and migration administrations deploy to prevent, or at least disturb, illegalised migrants’ attempts to regularise their status by becoming the parent of child that is entitled to German citizenship. Drawing on the autonomy of migration approach, I use migrants’ struggles within and against Germany’s migration and citizenship regime as an epistemic device to expose three kinds of informally institutionalised counter-tactics of street-level bureaucrats that qualify as unlawfare. The analysis shows that officials, in their attempts to forestall migrants’ practices of self-legalisation, frequently resort to practices that are legally questionable or outright unlawful themselves. Ultimately, not only a tough stance on illegalised migration, but the very production of migrant illegality emerges as contagious as it implicates an illegalisation of state practices.

Who Counts in Official Statistics? Ethical‐Epistemic Issues in German Migration and the Collection of Racial or Ethnic Data

ABSTRACTIn European countries (excluding the UK and Ireland), official statistics do not use racial or ethnic categories, but instead rely on proxies to collect data about discrimination. In the German microcensus, the proxy category adopted is ‘migration background’ (Migrationshintergrund): an individual has a ‘migration background’ when one or more of their parents does not have German citizenship by birth. We apply a coupled ethical‐epistemic analysis to the ‘migration background’ category to illuminate how the epistemic issues contribute to ethical ones. Our central claim is that these ethical‐epistemic issues with the ‘migration background’ category are best analysed in terms of Charles Mills's ‘white ignorance’. Appealing to Annette Martín's structural account of white ignorance, we highlight the cyclical reinforcement of ignorance and racial injustice in the use of the ‘migration background’ variable. Colourblind eliminativism about race perpetuates the use of ‘migration background’, which sustains and intensifies racial injustices.

Digitale und mehrkanalige Partizipation in Deutschland: Ein umfassender Überblick über Strukturen, Methoden und Determinanten

Citizen participation has played an increasingly relevant role in spatial planning and development aiming to shape sustainable and innovative processes since the 1970s. Nevertheless, analogue participation is associated with various problems, such as social selectivity and a loss of civic trust in administration and politics. Against this background, high expectations lie in the development of digital participation formats, which have significantly changed the participation landscape. Despite the rapid development of digital participation based on new technologies and external factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic, there is still a lack of comprehensive empirical studies on spatial patterns and determinants. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to give an overview of the patterns, methods and determinants of digital and multi-channel participation in Germany. We comprehensively investigated digital and multi-channel participation processes on the websites of German cities and districts – about 4,000 approaches in total. The results show spatial disparities in digital participation processes. While the availability of broadband internet and public debt do not significantly influence the digital participation density in districts and cities, low election turnouts go along with high densities. This suggests that the administrations are responding to political disinterest with digital participation. The results also indicate that digital participation can be less socially selective, as high shares of population without German citizenship, high migration rates and low employment rates have significant positive effects on digital participation.

Young children intuitively organize numbers on straight, horizontal lines from left to right before the onset of formal instruction.

The number line estimation task is frequently used to measure children's numerical magnitude understanding. It is unclear whether the resulting straight, horizontal, left-to-right-oriented estimate patterns indicate task constraints or children's intuitive number-space mapping. Three- to six-year-old children (N = 72, Mage = 4.89, 56% girls, 94% German citizenship) were asked to explain the meaning of numbers to a teddy by laying out a rope and attaching cards showing non-symbolic numerosities (dots) to it. Most children intuitively created straight, horizontal, and left-to-right-oriented representations. Characteristics of the line correlated with age, mathematical competencies, and home numeracy. This demonstrates the usefulness of the number line estimation task for assessing how children intuitively map numbers onto space.

German Health Update Fokus (GEDA Fokus) among Residents with Croatian, Italian, Polish, Syrian, or Turkish Citizenship in Germany: Protocol for a Multilingual Mixed-Mode Interview Survey.

Germany has a long history of migration. In 2020, more than 1 person in every 4 people had a statistically defined, so-called migration background in Germany, meaning that the person or at least one of their parents was born with a citizenship other than German citizenship. People with a history of migration are not represented proportionately to the population within public health monitoring at the Robert Koch Institute, thus impeding differentiated analyses of migration and health. To develop strategies for improving the inclusion of people with a history of migration in health surveys, we conducted a feasibility study in 2018. The lessons learned were implemented in the health interview survey German Health Update (Gesundheit in Deutschland aktuell [GEDA]) Fokus, which was conducted among people with selected citizenships representing the major migrant groups in Germany. GEDA Fokus aimed to collect comprehensive data on the health status and social, migration-related, and structural factors among people with selected citizenships to enable differentiated explanations of the associations between migration-related aspects and their impact on migrant health. GEDA Fokus is an interview survey among people with Croatian, Italian, Polish, Syrian, or Turkish citizenship living in Germany aged 18-79 years, with a targeted sample size of 1200 participants per group. The gross sample of 33,436 people was drawn from the residents' registration offices of 99 German municipalities based on citizenship. Sequentially, multiple modes of administration were offered. The questionnaire was available for self-administration (web-based and paper-based); in larger municipalities, personal or phone interviews were possible later on. Study documents and the questionnaire were bilingual-in German and the respective translation language depending on the citizenship. Data were collected from November 2021 to May 2022. Overall, 6038 respondents participated in the survey, of whom 2983 (49.4%) were female. The median age was 39 years; the median duration of residence in Germany was 10 years, with 19.69% (1189/6038) of the sample being born in Germany. The overall response rate was 18.4% (American Association for Public Opinion Research [AAPOR] response rate 1) and was 6.8% higher in the municipalities where personal interviews were offered (19.3% vs 12.5%). Overall, 78.12% (4717/6038) of the participants self-administered the questionnaire, whereas 21.88% (1321/6038) took part in personal interviews. In total, 41.85% (2527/6038) of the participants answered the questionnaire in the German language only, 16.69% (1008/6038) exclusively used the translation. Offering different modes of administration, as well as multiple study languages, enabled us to recruit a heterogeneous sample of people with a history of migration. The data collected will allow differentiated analyses of the role and interplay of migration-related and social determinants of health and their impact on the health status of people with selected citizenships. DERR1-10.2196/43503.

Recommendations for collecting and analysing migration-related determinants in public health research.

According to the definition of the German Federal Statistical Office, about every fourth person living in Germany has a so-called migration background (MB), i.e., the person or at least one of their parents was born without German citizenship. However, MB has been defined differently in many studies. Also, the MB summarises people in different living situations, making differentiated analysis in health science more difficult. This article formulates recommendations for the collection and analysis of migration-related, as well as social and structural, determinants of health. As part of the Improving Health Monitoring in Migrant Populations project (IMIRA), the previous approaches to operationalise and measure migration-related determinants were revised based on literature research and exchange formats, such as workshops, meetings, congress contributions, etc. Instead of MB, the country of birth of the respondents and their parents, duration of residence, citizenship(s), residence status, and German language proficiency should be recorded as minimum indicators and analysed as individual variables. Further social and structural determinants, such as socioeconomic position, working and housing conditions, or self-reported discrimination, should be included. In order to describe health inequalities and to specifically identify the needs of people with a history of migration, a mutual and differentiated consideration of migration-related and social determinants of health is essential.

Aggressive behavior and severe mental disorders in Prison psychiatry

IntroductionAggressive behavior can be understood as a compelx and social phenomenon. A number of studies have shown that the risk of aggressive behavior is increased for patients with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Although specialized forensic institutions exist in many countries, most offenders with mental disorders are still found in prison settings what corresponds to international literature suggesting an increased prevalence of mental disorders in prison inmates. Still, data on the specific characteristics of patients demonstrating aggressive behavior in medical and mental health settings is limited, especially for prison environments.ObjectivesThe aim of our study was to identify patient characteristics that are potentially associated with aggressive incidents in a prison psychiatric setting.MethodsIn routine documentation in German prisons, specific incidents, as e.g. aggressive behavior are reported through an official reporting system. Analyzing these official reports, we collected all aggressive incidents concerning at the Department of Psychiatry of the Berlin prison hospital between 1997 and 2019. In addition, for each patient acting aggressively, we collected data on an equal number of patients who did not demonstrate this behavior during their hospital stay. For those patients with more than one inpatient treatment period, only the first stay in the prison hospital was included. Furthermore, patients were excluded based on age (younger than 16 or older than 70) or death during treatment. The statistical data was analyzed descriptively.ResultsIn total, 225 treatment episodes were included of which in 118 cases violent behavior were documented. The items older age, German citizenship, previous violent crimes (OR = 0,40, 95 % KI: 0,35 – 1,17) and antipsychotic (OR = 0,28, 95 % KI: 0,14 – 0,55) or antidepressant (OR = 0,35, 95 % KI: 0,13 – 0,88) treatment within six months prior to admission had a rather protective effect on the occurrence of aggressive behavior during inpatient treatment. Alcohol (OR = 1,21, 95 % KI: 0,64 – 2,27) and drug use disorders (OR = 2.18, 95 % KI: 1,09 – 4,44) tended to be risk factors for aggressive behavior. Thus, the results in this prison psychiatric population correspond to the risk factors described in the literature.ConclusionsThe reported results point in the direction that optimising the availability of psychopharmacological treatment options and offering specialized treatment for patients with comorbid substance use disorder may lead to the prevention of aggressive behavior in patients with a schizophrenia diagnosis.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Jannis Panagiotidis. The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany.

Jannis Panagiotidis’s ambitious comparative study, The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany, highlights what was common and what was distinctive in policies of the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel that privileged access to citizenship for certain immigrants belonging to the dominant ethnic or, in the case of Israel, religious group. Panagiotidis focuses especially on rejections of individual applications for treatment as Aussiedler (resettler) or oleh (someone who goes up, to Israel) that forced policy makers and gatekeepers in each country to clarify their priorities. “It was the unchosen ones who defined the chosen ones” (4). Both states justified their privileging of members of the dominant ethnic or religious group on the basis of past and current persecution. During and after the Second World War, ethnic Germans suffered both from popular hatreds created by Nazi rule and official policies of ethnic cleansing, which led to the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from their homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The West German Basic Law of May 1949, the constitution of the Federal Republic, established the right of expellees and refugees of German Volkszugehörigkeit (belongingness to the German people) to be considered German citizens once they arrived in West Germany. The 1953 law that implemented this clause extended the meaning of the term “expellee” to include all ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc countries, and Yugoslavia even after the end of official expulsions. This continuing access to West German citizenship was “a consequence of the assumption that conditions in the old homeland [of the “expellee”] under foreign and communist rule had become unbearable” (42).

The Enlightenment of the Development of Citizenship Education in Germany to the Promotion of Ideological and Political Education in China

Citizenship education in Germany has a long history and a profound tradition. However, German citizenship education has been in constant split and reconstruction in a long period as the ups and downs of the destiny of the German nation and its country. It is endowed with different concepts, connotations and functions, along with every change of social situation and political order. Citizenship education in Germany is deeply influenced by its traditional political culture and has distinct national characteristics. In order to discuss the history and current situation of the historical development process and realistic situation of German citizenship education has many enlightenment and reference significance for promoting the further development of ideological and political education, especially the theory and practice of patriotism education in our country.

Determinants of welfare benefit use of immigrant groups - longitudinal evidence from Germany.

While recent literature in Germany has compared predictors of welfare use between EU and non-EU immigrants, refugees have yet to be added to the analysis. Using survey data of approximately 4,000 immigrants living in Germany, I examine the determinants of basic unemployment benefits receipt for intra-EU immigrants, refugees, and third country immigrants. In particular, I investigate how education affects the likelihood of welfare use for each immigrant group. Even after controlling for human capital factors, sociodemographic characteristics, and factors related to migration such as legal status and age at migration, refugees remain significantly more likely to receive benefits. Results demonstrate that higher education significantly decreases the likelihood of welfare receipt for EU and third country immigrants, but much less so for refugees. These findings may indicate that refugees' education is not being used to its full potential in the labor market or that they face additional challenges hindering their labor market integration. A further and unanticipated finding is that immigrants who hold permanent residency or German citizenship are less likely to receive unemployment benefits, pointing either to positive effects of a secure residency or selection into permanent residency and citizenship among those with the greatest labor market success. Overall, this research shows that challenges beyond human capital deficiencies and sociodemographic characteristics must be considered when studying immigrants' receipt of social benefits, that not all educational credentials are valued equally, and that the experiences of refugees differ in significant ways from those of other immigrant groups.

M. Mustafa İyi (Ed.), Kesitler: Üçüncü Kuşakla Konuşmalar, GAV Perspektif Yayınları, 2021, pp. 410, 72 TL, ISBN: 978-605-73877-0-7

On the sixtieth anniversary of the labor migration from Turkey to Germany, social scientists must contemplate the position of the descendants of the guest-workers in contemporary German society as an exclusive social phenomenon. Germany has considered labor migrants to be temporary residents for a long time, therefore, avoiding enacting the legal framework to recognize their substantive membership rights in the polity. Until the amendments at the beginning of the 21st century, formal citizenship was largely inaccessible for labor migrants and their families due to the jus sanguinis (right of blood) principle. Historically, German citizenship was defined through an ethnic understanding of nationhood.

The invisible hard work of retrieving papers: Syrians and the paradoxes of integration in Germany

ABSTRACT Seemingly mundane bureaucratic papers – such as birth and marriage certificates – are official proof of legal identities and relations to kin, usually issued by the state of origin. For Syrians who have sought asylum in Germany, these documents are necessary during the asylum procedure and beyond, for certain bureaucratic procedures and the recording of crucial life events. Retracing the crafting of these documents in Syria, and their encounter with German bureaucracy, captures the depth of the entanglement between the Syrian and German citizenship regimes, as well as their discrepancies in relation to paperwork and legality. Drawing on ethnographic research with Syrians in Lebanon and in Germany, this article argues that the legal production of legality in Germany can only be achieved through legally ambiguous, if not so-called illegal, practices in Syria.

Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig

Reviewed by: Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig Sarah Colvin Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989. By Sebastian Gehrig. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2021. xiii+327 pp. $145; £107. ISBN 978–1–80073–083–0. Sebastian Gehrig has written a detailed, scholarly, and very useful account of the legislative debates and tensions in East and West Germany during the Cold War: that is, at a time when the political legitimacy of the competing German states depended not least on their perceived adherence to international legal standards. This new study opens out a novel and important perspective on the 'two Germanies' not as merely divided, but as importantly and complexly entangled in the context of their shared national history. Among other things, Gehrig meticulously unpicks the entangled intricacies of East and West German citizenship law, offering crucial historical background for those seeking to understand the debates around Federal German citizenship laws and (right-wing) identity politics now. Law and rights, Gehrig demonstrates, were a key element in the Cold War battle for legitimacy between East and West Germany, even while the competing ideologies of the two states meant that terms such as citizenship and human rights had different meanings, which shifted over time. Consideration is also given to how post-war decolonization and the global development of nation states impacted on conceptions of law, rights, and the state, and how East Germany's branding of West Germany [End Page 515] as neo-fascist and neo-colonial accompanied the GDR's diplomatic efforts to be recognized in Africa as a nation state. In the context of the overarching narrative of legislative developments and entanglements, Gehrig offers fascinating micro-stories on issues such as the legal and political manoeuvring that drove the outlawing of the West German Communist Party (KPD) in 1956, or the domestic struggles over Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. In 1973 both Germanies were accepted into the United Nations, and Gehrig's study charts the establishment of international human rights norms in both Germanies, at least in theory. In the GDR, the author comments, 'legal realities remained a different matter' (p. 225); though the same could conceivably be said of the FRG, whose treatment of its prisoners from the domestic terrorist groups in the mid-1970s drew letters of protest to the Federal German government from Amnesty International (Gehrig does address problematic aspects of West German counter-terrorism measures in the 1970s, but not the highly controversial treatment of accused and convicted members of the terrorist groups in West German prisons). Gehrig notes that in East Germany citizens' rights were not absolute or basic, but contingent on individuals' participation in the socialist project. Crime in the GDR failed to abate in the way it was supposed to as socialism developed, Gehrig notes; but again, the problems of penal law and practice are not part of his study. Nelson Mandela rather famously wrote that 'no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails', and it would have been extremely interesting to see the penal codes and practices of the two Germanies contextualized in this otherwise comprehensive study. It remains, however, an admirable piece of work that not only does a very significant amount of meticulous groundwork, but provides new and fascinating perspectives on and insights into East and West Germany after 1945, and tracks the after-effects of that time to the present day in ways that should inflect thinking on citizenship and identity now. Sarah Colvin University of Cambridge Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Non-Participation in Smartphone Data Collection Using Research Apps

Abstract Research apps allow to administer survey questions and passively collect smartphone data, thus providing rich information on individual and social behaviours. Agreeing to this novel form of data collection requires multiple consent steps, and little is known about the effect of non-participation. We invited 4,293 Android smartphone owners from the German Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) to download the IAB-SMART app. The app collected data over six months through (a) short in-app surveys and (b) five passive mobile data collection functions. The rich information on PASS members from previous survey waves allows us to compare participants and non-participants in the IAB-SMART study at the individual stages of the participation process and across the different types of data collected. We find that 14.5 percent of the invited smartphone users installed the app, between 12.2 and 13.4 percent provided the different types of passively collected data, and 10.8 percent provided all types of data at least once. Likelihood to participate was smaller among women, decreased with age and increased with educational attainment, German citizenship, and PASS tenure. We find non-participation bias in substantive variables, including overestimation of social media usage and social network size and underestimation of non-working status.

Политическая нелояльность и военные преступления Прибалтийских дворян в годы первой мировой войны

In the Soviet historiography of the First World War, a false opinion was formed that representatives of the large local nobility who had “Germanic roots” (as a rule, natives of Germany or persons who had Russian and German citizenship) were a category of persons politically disloyal to the Russian autocracy. They allegedly saw their national-patriotic mission in acts of overt and covert sabotage of Russia's military security in the Baltic states - from hanging the national flags of Germany on the roofs of their estates to creating favorable conditions for the invasion of “Teutonic knights”.Another myth that can be traced in some works of modern Russian historians is that all Baltic barons of German origin, in the conditions of an armed clash between Russian and German military and naval forces, remained loyal to the Tsar and the Fatherland (Russian Empire) to the end.In this article, the author set himself the goal of reconciling the existing historical differences and contradictions, showing an objective picture of front-line political life, the central figures of which in the Baltic provinces (at different times, some districts of Courland and Livonia) were German barons. For this, an attempt was made to trace the evolution of the “enemy image”, which was embodied in the “Eastsee nobles”. It was concluded that their initial stereotypical perception and misinterpretation of the border threat was based only on the speculation of police and military officials.This and other (including those opposite in meaning) conclusions were based on archival documents discovered and introduced by the author into scientific circulation. Initially, the counterintelligence officers of the Northern Front did not have a clear idea of the hostile intentions and, moreover, the illegal activities of the Baltic barons. However, with the beginning of the “Great Retreat” of the Russian armies, some of them were faced with a difficult moral choice: Whom should they be loyal to and serve - their ancestral homeland or their homeland (Russia)? As a result of the preferences given, the overwhelming minority of the nobility, as follows from the correspondence on the counterintelligence line, committed crimes that were qualified by the current Russian criminal legislation as treason. And, at the same time, due to the fact that none of the criminally prosecuted, first of all, Courland barons ended up in the dock, and the judicial authorities never passed a single guilty verdict, we cannot consider them criminals.

Angela Merkel’s Record on Immigration and Gender

ABSTRACT Angela Merkel served as Chancellor at a time when German society was quickly diversifying due to immigration. Her policy choices now shape the life chances of millions of immigrants and their descendants. These choices also set the terms on which Germans will decide which divisions and which forms of solidarity will characterise the society in the years to come. Merkel was more willing to accept the reality of immigration than earlier CDU leaders. And yet I argue that, faced with rapid societal change, the Merkel governments generally avoided deep reforms of existing institutions, even those that yield sharp disparities by immigration status and gender. I find that, although Merkel focused on economic integration and female labour force participation, immigrant-origin residents have made only slow progress in these areas, though educational disparities have narrowed. Additionally, millions of long-term residents still lack German citizenship and the right to vote, so that their voices are muted in debates over what it means to be German. Meanwhile support for anti-immigrant extremists has surged. I conclude that it is an open question whether Merkel’s conservative approach will provide a stable basis for the economic, social, and political consolidation of a more diverse Germany.

Affordances of a New Language: Abbas Khider’s Claim to Community inGerman for Everyone

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Identität und Sprache des Migranten in der Fremde im Werk von Franco Biondi

Seen from the point of view of literary-sociological studies, Franco Biondi’s works are part of the migrant and foreign literatures which emerged in Germany in the wake of the recruitment of foreign labour starting in the 1950s. This literature – written by authors who are not Germans in the sense of the old German nationality and citizenship legislation, but who live in Germany and have their works published in the German language area – was formerly called ‘guest-worker literature’. Then, in the 1980s, it was referred to as a literature of ‘shock and stunned silence’, and in the 1990s as ‘migrant literature’ or ‘literature of foreign parts’. The theme in Biondi ’s works is the break with origin and the process of ‘coming-to-language’ of the identity that is forming through the medium of language in the encounter with the foreign. Immigration for Biondi becomes immigration into a new language.

Workload and Rehabilitation Needs of Older Workers with and without Migrant Background - Results of the lidA Cohort Study

The need for rehabilitation measures will increase in the future due to increasing retirement age and demographic changes. In addition, the need for rehabilitation measures is determined, among other things, by the strenuousness of work. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether employees with a migrant background (EmM) are exposed to strenuous work more often and have a higher need for rehabilitation than employees without a migrant background (EoM). The lidA study is a nationwide, prospective cohort study focusing on work, age, health and labour force participation. Study subjects (2443 female, 2281 male) were socially secured employees, born in 1959 or 1965. They were personally interviewed with computer assistance. Data from the first study wave (2011) were used. Multiple logistic regression analyses adjusted for socio-demographic factors (age, gender, education and household equivalent income) were carried out to estimate the influence of migrant background, nationality and high workloads on the need for rehabilitation. First generation EmMs were particularly affected by high workloads compared to EoM. The subjectively experienced workloads of EoM and EmM of the second generation were on a comparable level. In contrast, there were no differences between EmM with German and foreign citizenship. After adjustment for sociodemographic and workload-related factors, a higher need for rehabilitation was shown for the first-generation EmM (not significant) in comparison with the second-generation EoM and EmM, but not for EmM with foreign citizenship in comparison with EmM with German citizenship. First-generation EmMs are exposed to strenuous work significantly more often and have a higher need for rehabilitation. However, the migrant background itself is not a determinant for increased rehabilitation needs. The significantly higher need for rehabilitation can rather be explained by the strenuousness of work and socio-demographic characteristics that are more frequent in first-generation EmM. Differentiated considerations of the subgroups of EmM are important to identify special needs and to avoid undersupply (e. g. due to access barriers).